At the tail end of Mother’s Day, when the cold wind has died down, and our socially distant visit to Mom and Dad in Amsterdam has concluded, I open up FaceBook and stumble upon one of my brother’s friends starting a live piano session. Being fortunate enough to have a considerable number of talented friends in my feed, another live session is nothing new or exceptional, but I remembered Karl as being one of the craziest friends my brother ever had – and that is saying something. Maybe it was Amsterdam on my mind, maybe it was the sudden calm of night, or maybe it was the music – most likely it was all of that, and so I stayed on his page, listening as he played his Sunday evening beer jam. It had a bit of the blues in it, a bit of grace, some God and some devil, and such tender gorgeousness that at one point I had to stop and sit down, on the verge of weeping for something so heartbreakingly beautiful.
When we were kids he lived a few blocks away from us, on Summit Avenue I think, and it was just him and his sister and their Mom. At least, that’s how I remember it. As he was one of my brother’s friends, I didn’t invest that much. Hell, I didn’t invest that much in my own friends. And there was also something in him that scared the crap out of me. Like I said, he was legitimately one of the craziest of my brother’s classmates, known for doing absurdly dangerous things at which most of us cringed in both awe and admiration. Wild in a way that we would never understand, as if he had seen things too traumatic to leave him anything other than changed in the way that trauma changes you. And it was something neither my brother nor I could access. We were lucky for that. My brother took it all in casually without breaking stride. I was more fascinated and intrigued, drawn in by whatever brush he had with darkness. I sensed even then a kindred spirit in anyone who had been hurt.
In the dusty, musty, rusty bin of his garage, my brother and I would sometimes find ourselves hanging out while Karl would test the waters of whether he could come out and play. Broken bits of a bike he had torn up in daredevil antics littered the dirty floor. Dim and devoid of color, the memory is a rare sepia-toned one. So much of my childhood is recalled in vivid color, or at least the super-saturated Kodachrome photographs that make up my memories. This one comes back drained of its Technicolor vibrance, as if still covered in a coating of dust, untouched and unexplored.
I remember his mother, never without a cigarette, her bright blonde curly hair messily tied up and always half spilling out of some bun. She wore torn denim shorts and a halter-top in the summer, always at exotic odds with most of the mothers I knew. There was something dangerous about her too, or maybe that’s just my overly-sensitive kid coming out in unexpected ways. In a similar aspect, that’s why Karl scared me, more for his unpredictability and utter disregard for safety in his daredevil ways. I am loathe to admit that we may have pushed him to greater stunts, to jump off higher cliffs, to thrash and wreck what little was left of his old bike. Kids did that – we pushed each other to do the things we were most scared of, just to see, just to watch, just to survive. It didn’t matter if the other person got hurt. Kids are awful sometimes. We didn’t know. We didn’t care. We didn’t think much through. And when we found someone willing to risk it all we didn’t value them so much as a friend as much as a show to be seen, especially on hot summer days that droned on and always carried an air of boredom in a town like Amsterdam.
We played hide and seek together sometimes, and if we were on the same team I felt both emboldened and terrified. Alone, he could frighten you with mischievous eyes glinting with feral ferocity, but as long as he was on your team you could count on him to fight to the end. You didn’t want to know what he went through, you just wanted to make sure he was on your side. There was little enough a kid could control. Choosing which team to be on was all we had some days. And so I was always glad when Karl was on my team. It was the only way to attempt to control the uncontrollable. Another thing I didn’t think of: what might happen if the person on your own team decided to self-destruct and bring the entire team down with him? What if someone in your own home decided to burn it all to the ground without a modicum of self-preservation? I was lucky. I never had to find out. We didn’t stay long at Karl’s, at least I didn’t. Brief brushes with such drama were intoxicating, but only in small, measured doses. We’d be back on our bikes and pedaling somewhere else before soaking in too much. I think we knew, or were warned, not to enter the house proper. My brother never seemed quite as spooked by it as I did, though I never let on. I peppered him with questions to no avail. He either didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered to remember. Even though he was younger, I always wanted to be more like him. To not care, to not be bothered by things like that. Or to take it in and move instantly on, leaving it behind, letting it go. Instead, I stayed haunted. By a dusty garage and a broken bike. By a lost baseball and shards of glass. By a confused half-smile and a curl of smoke. By all that was unsaid and unexplained.
Are there kids who band together to keep themselves safe? I am sure there are. We were lucky – we were never in such mortal danger. And maybe that’s why we never had to get close to anyone, to truly rely on someone to be there to save our lives – because our lives were never endangered. No more than any average kid’s life is endangered, though I suppose all of us were in some way. Somehow we each managed to survive our childhoods – Karl, my brother, and me – and all three of us did it such vastly different ways. These days Karl makes beautiful music. My brother makes beautiful furniture. And I’m just trying to make some sort of beautiful peace with the past.
